Programme Delivery Manager Head of Functions - Office for National Statistics - G6

Location: The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport and Titchfield (Fareham). All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time. The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

About the job

Job summary: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK's largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

We are looking for a highly motivated and dynamic Programme Delivery Manager to take on a Head of Function (HoF) role, leading and energising the IT Service Manager, IT Infrastructure Engineer, and DevSecOps communities across the Digital Services Directorate. Working in close partnership with other Heads of Function within Digital Services (DS), you will be responsible for building a vibrant, collaborative and high-performing community, driving alignment with organisational strategy and enabling pace, momentum and delivery of key organisational objectives.

You will have an energy and enthusiasm to lead the Community and will bring passion and a proactive mindset to leading the community, championing knowledge sharing, consistent ways of working, and continuous learning and development. Through your enthusiasm and drive, you will foster a strong sense of community, empowering colleagues to collaborate, innovate and grow.

Our team culture is based around agile working and keeping our users - both internally and externally - at the centre of our thinking. You will lead from the front in embedding agile principles, maintaining pace and momentum, and evolving the IT Service Manager, IT Infrastructure Engineer, and DevSecOps communities to be responsive, forward-looking, and resilient.

Job description: A Programme Delivery Manager is accountable for the delivery of complex products and services that are being delivered by multiple teams or have high technical or political risk. Responsibilities include:

• Manage dependencies of varying complexity, potentially planning, and feeding into larger programmes and portfolios.
• Remove blockers and manage risks, commercials, budgets, and people.
• Balance objectives and can redeploy people and resources as priorities change.
• Have an in-depth knowledge of agile and other methodologies.
• Understand, manage, and communicate between complex stakeholder groups, balancing priorities.
• Be the initial escalation point for the programme and maintain awareness of the bigger picture.
• Support the programme director by overseeing the delivery of their vision for the programme.
• Support and coach delivery managers.

Responsibilities:

• Lead delivery where multiple product or service teams need to collaborate to deliver and ensure interdependencies and cross-cutting team issues are dealt with.
• Ensure that agile principles and practices are deeply embedded and that all teams have the right skills and access to development that they need to do their roles.
• Encourage a culture of innovation focused on adding value.
• Effectively manage team dynamics when working across departmental and other boundaries.
• Actively develop agile capability of teams, learning, sharing, and re-applying skills and knowledge and bringing in good practice.
• Communicate service performance against key indicators to internal and external stakeholders.

This campaign is for external candidates who wish to be based at either our Newport or Titchfield site. Therefore this campaign has been linked with the internal advert. If you are an internal candidate to ONS please apply via the other campaign. The selection and interview process will be combined, so you do not need to apply for both campaigns.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Agile and Lean practices (Expert) - Coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean good practices. Create and tailor the right approach for a team, challenging, evaluating and iterating the approach through the life cycle. Experiment with new and innovative ways of working to improve delivery across the organisation. Act as a recognised expert and advocate for Agile and Lean approaches.
• Community Collaboration (Expert) - Act as a champion for community-led initiatives, supporting their delivery and encouraging broader engagement. Foster engagement and encourage active participation in the community, role modelling collaborative behaviours. Advocate and role model knowledge sharing (for example, mentoring community leads). Work with the Head of Function/Head of Practice/Community Lead to develop the maturity of the community and professional growth of its members, providing leadership, feedback and insight.
• Maintaining delivery momentum (Expert) - Optimise the delivery flow of teams. Actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists. Identify innovative ways to unblock issues.
• Making the process work (Expert) - Identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated. Add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes. Guide teams through the implementation of a new process.
• Planning (Expert) - Lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment. Plan beyond product delivery. Identify dependencies in plans across services and co-ordinate delivery. Coach other teams as the central point of expertise.